I have
some friends who are going through lengthy ordeals involving family members.
These friends are concerned for those close to them. One emailed me an update;
she closed it by saying she was living Luke 18.
In my
devotional reading, I came across the following excerpt. I marvel at what this
write says. I am caught by God’s timing. Receiving my one friend’s email,
hearing my other friend’s anxiety, and finding this passage all came this
week.
“According
to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The
images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though it was rather
comic to have to explain it all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow
bread at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on
knocking anyway until he finally gives you what you want so he can go back to
bed again (Luke 11:5-8)Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the
case of a certain poor widow, presumably because there’s nothing much in it for
him. But she keeps on hounding him until he hears her case just to get her out
of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says won’t give his own child
a black eye when he asks for peanut
butter and jelly, so how all the more will God when his child ask—(Matthew
7:9-11).
“Be importunate1, Jesus says—no one
assumes, because you have to beat a path to God’s door before he will open it,
but because you beat a path there’s no way of getting to your door. ‘Ravish my
heart,’ John Donne wrote. But God will not usually ravish. He will only court.”
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1 adjective, 1.) urgent or
persistent in solicitation, sometimes annoyingly so. 2) pertinacious, as
solicitations or demands. 3) troublesome; annoying.
From Wistful Thinking by Frederick Buechner.
Found in disciplines for the inner life by Bob Benson and Michael Benson